"The Nigeria-Biafra war, 50 years on, and the building on alternative archives."

International Development Seminar Series 2019-2020

Fifty years after, the Nigeria-Biafra conflict and its audiovisual archives

Speaker - Françoise Ugochukwu (DPP)

The Nigeria-Biafra war (1967-1970) tore the Federation apart. From the 1970s, the successive Nigerian governments chose to smolder the memory of the conflict, leaving the traumatized survivors to keep silent. This paper shows how the programmed silencing on the war and its corollary, the near-absence of museums and open discussions on the survivors’ experience, led to a slow yet irrepressible flow of testimonies away from habitual channels, making use of all available media – press, radio, television and the web, in Igbo and in English. These audio-visual testimonies place this war on the map again and replace the missing archives from those years, revealing the trauma suffered by those who lived through that conflict.   

Please register by emailing FASS-collaborations@open.ac.uk